


Two: The Fault Lines.

by Formaldehyde (Johnlockology)



Series: A Study In Grief [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, BBC Sherlock - Freeform, Grief/Mourning, Johnlock - Freeform, M/M, POV First Person, POV Sherlock Holmes, Post Reichenbach, Romance, Sexual Tension, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-10
Updated: 2013-03-10
Packaged: 2017-12-04 21:55:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/715529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Johnlockology/pseuds/Formaldehyde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock Holmes takes a fall, wakes up in a new position, remembers his last best memory, and refuses to give up something precious.</p><p>This chapter will make the most sense if read after One: After the Fall, part one of the A Study in Grief series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two: The Fault Lines.

_In which chance would be a fine thing._

[January 15th]

I've been dead for two hundred and twelve minutes. Something about that is balanced, and something about that is also woefully imprecise. So I close my eyes. I let the morgue light wash over the papery grit in my throat. I let sixty seconds alter my perception of the time, of how it passes. And things tilt slightly in my favour, amidst the quirks of chronology. Sequencing is predictable, to be sure. I learned this much when I was four and a half. But the glory of it is that on occasion, the events within a sequence can still take your breath away.

When I open my eyes, she is still crying. Naturally.

I clear my throat, but when I hear my own voice against the sounds of her muffled sobs, it sounds strained and hoarse. By contrast, on the inside, I’m perfectly calm. On the inside, my tones are well-modulated enough to present a post-doctoral discourse on decomposition in the human body.

“Molly.”

She comes to lean against the side of my cadaver dissection table. She’s been crying since the night before, her sclerae obstinately pink. The skin beneath her eyes looks stretched taut, as if she’s taken a botulinum injection of desperation to her epidermis. Over the past five years, I’ve grown accustomed to seeing Molly Hooper in tears, mostly those she tries to blink away in furious shame. I tilt my head to the side, taking her in, the quivering mould of her jawline, the hastily assembled pretense of elegance innate in her sideswept braid. A switch-thin line of lip pigment stains her mouth, bleeding mauve into the faded cast of her face. It is very unflattering.

I open my mouth to tell her so, but upon consideration of some advice that’s stood me, for the most part, in good stead, I shut it. There are blood flecks on the inner seams of the greatcoat, easy to miss if one isn’t paying attention.

When I observe Molly again, her fingers have balled into useless fists. _Useless_ , here, seems the appropriate term, as I know she isn’t going to do anything with them. All the same, they look like they hurt her. I reach out to steady her when she begins to sway, and she snaps at me.

“Leave off, Sherlock,” she growls, her eyes widening as she lets her gaze document my face, taking in as much of me as she possibly can. “Oh, Christ, I – I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s so…” she pauses, fiddling with the loose buttons on her lab coat. It’s the one with pink piped stitches hidden on the reverse side of collar and sleeves. She wears it when she wants to feel pretty about herself but can’t bear the ignominy of slathering foundation and daubing concealer onto her cheeks. She wears it for those desperate days, which is to say, often.

So it’s no surprise she’s wearing it now.

“…it’s so _cosmically_ fucked up,” she finishes, her voice lined with a vehemence I haven’t heard there before. The circumstances are extraordinary, however, so perhaps they warrant a bit of that.

I try to gentle my tone, to do what I’ve heard others around me do, ever since I met them, ever since they moved in. But it doesn’t work, and my comfort is calcified before it even exits my throat.

“There now, Molly. Ahem,” I hastily add as she glances at me in horror, unsure as I am of what to do with my posturing succour. “It’s safe for us to move, now. It’s all been managed, between Mycroft,” I pause, “and you. Thank you, Molly. I couldn’t have done it without –”

“Don’t lie,” she exhales, as if she’s just completed a marathon in high heels and is at once weary and in physical distress. “You could have got on well enough without me. So don’t fib. You’d’ve found a way, you would have, you _always_ find a way, no matter what it takes. Or who you have to. Nevermind.”

She pushes off the side of my cadaver dissection table, squares her shoulders, then turns to face me full on.

“Right,” she says, “let’s get you to your big brother.”

 

[Eleven days prior]

The experiment I’m conducting is delightful, only he isn’t to know about it, just yet.

“Hygiene, Sherlock,” he’d say good-naturedly, not quite rolling his eyes in my direction, not quite prone to innate dramatics. As Mrs. Hudson says, the giddy cantilevering is best left to one flat member of 221B. (I make a mental note to tell her that she’s used the wrong word, again.)

Besides, he couldn’t keep up with me. I’d outstrip him.

It’s a few days past Christmas, and he’s sorting through the small pile of presents he’s gotten from Harry, whose impromptu reconciliation with Clara signified a last-minute trip to the Bahamas, signifying in turn his sister’s absence from the Yuletide dinner table. She left him a miniature mountain of guilt-wrapped gifts in recompense, and because he doesn’t say anything about this, because his crooked smile is fuelled with a bit _extra_ when she rings him on New Year’s Day, I know that he misses her, despite himself.

I can’t claim to understand it. I could do without seeing Mycroft for entire months at a time. I’ve gone without seeing him for much longer, and back then I was in far greater need of the platinum Lloyds credit card currently in residence beneath Billy’s bony protuberances. I lean back into the Thinking Sofa, less comfortable since _he’s_ not wrapped around me like a companionable warm beast, a creature of cashmere-blend jumpers (I’ve thrown out the unflattering lumpy ones) and pressed trousers and breath that hints of brandied tea tempered by my scent.

As for my breath, _well._ That’s the experiment.

From across the room, he looks at me, cocks his head, and I know I’ve a _wee saucy smile_ turning up the corners of my mouth. I let it dart from one cheek to the other, because it’s what he’s always liked, long before he began mapping out the creases on my face with his tongue.

 _That ruddy infuriating grin, Sherlock_ , he said last night, in between careful, sharp kisses. Teeth like gentle suitors hungry for the honeymoon. Hands that never shake except when they touch me, which is what I’ve always liked. Which is as it should be. _That... maddening madman’s snarl._

I opened my mouth to tell him that he was being redundant, but he sealed it up for several minutes without air, without room to protest. I could have breathed in through my nostrils, sure, _fine._ Only, breathing is boring when you know you’re going to be revived. You might as well let yourself drift to the bottom of the well. You might as well extend your wrists up to the fading light.

Another trick, I think, it would be best not to mention. A good bit worse than the one I’m conducting now.

“Wow,” he’s saying, and I snap to, sitting up slightly as he crosses the room to stand before me, thrusting a hardbound book into my hands. It’s brightly coloured, blue with a white and a black cumulus drawn on the glossy jacket cover.

“Electric,” simpers the sycophantic endorsement across the top of the graphic. “Filled with staccato bursts of humor and tragedy.”

 _Humor. American._ I wrinkle my nose and nudge the book back onto his palms. _A novel._

“Yes, but Sherlock!” He’s grinning now, genuinely grinning, and I damp down the echoes of what he’s actually saying to drink in the neverending marvel of this, the way a visage so weathered by war and everyday living lights up like London under siege, with the sort of fireworks he can’t stand, the bombastic displays he only tolerates because of how they send me _cantilevering,_ according to Mrs. H. He loves to see me possessed with joy, but he has no real cognizance of how much I crave the same response in him. It doesn’t take a sky full of expensive fire to draw it out, either.

What it takes, apparently, is a scrawled signature in purple marker. I frown, and focus on the wobbly lines where his index finger is just, at this moment, emphatically pressed.

“— _no idea_ how she managed it, she must’ve got it done through Clara’s relative who’s on the Arts Council; I suppose that lot have all kinds of author and publisher connections; they can arrange signings. Wow. I’m... seriously, this is bloody brilliant of her. He can only obviously sign so many; you should have a look at his vlogs, Sherlock, he’s really clever—”

He continues to babble, the book pressed tight against his thigh, but the last thing he says pulls me up short. I grab his free wrist with more force than intended, and I know I’m frowning when he looks at me, but I don’t want to help it.

“Clever? Who’s _really_ clever?”

I can tell by the mild crinkle in his brow, the slight, almost delicate pursing of his lips, that he’s laughing at me, only too nice to do it out loud, right this second. That’s fine. He won’t be laughing in a minute or two. “John Green, Sherlock, only I don’t know why I’m telling you this; you’re going to delete it in a handful of – oh!” he exhales as I draw him up to me, setting the Christmas present on the armrest of the sofa. I handle him so that his knees begin to lever mine apart, so that he’s looming over me, which happens more often than our admirers might think.

I would glance over at the book for emphasis, but watching the things that are happening to his face is much more interesting, just now. I keep my eyes on his, even while I set my lips to the inside of his wrist, tasting the way his body starts to burn alive for me.

“He’s clever, then. Is he,” I pause, dragging an incisor up the most outstanding vein in his arm, yanking up his jumper sleeve for more access, “a genius? Is he _brilliant_ , too?”

I don’t have to look at him to know that heat has coloured his cheekbones in surrender, that his knees are having a hell of a time staying pressed to mine, that he wants more than anything, more than he wants to admire that signature again, to collapse atop me, and to let me show him for the fifth time this Friday just how clever I can be.

“No,” he swallows, and his voice is already fraying, “... no, Sherlock, _Christ,_ of course not,” he watches as I lift my head, as I do what I know dissects him, leaning back and drawing him against me, my hands as gentle as they’ve been in this new year.

He is so beautiful, always but especially right now, sinking into his own capitulation, embracing the quicksand and begging me for more, that I decide to tell him about the morning’s experiment.

“I haven’t brushed my teeth in six hours.”

He draws back slightly, not sure what to make of this new data, but I can be patient for him. I smile indulgently while he fumbles through it aloud. “But... hmm... six hours ago, you were – we were in Hounslow, at the crime scene where the vicar... ” he pauses, because my mouth is venturing up the unsteady map of his throat, all his cartographic points of certitude jumbling and blurring under my compass incisions, and it’s _fantastic_.

Gamely, he soldiers on, even while his none-too-steady hands are disassembling my shirt buttons. “... and, um, you got bored, didn’t you, so you dragged me in that – fuck, _Sherlock,_ ” he swears, shivering in delight when my teeth nick the bruise he earned this morning, the only visible mark from our Hounslow dalliance. It would have been remarkably tedious if not for these new blossoms on his body, if not for the other thing he’s about to say.

“You dragged me in the stairwell and you took me in your m...”

“Yes. Would you like to taste yourself, now?”

His new book clatters to the carpet, but I don’t think he takes notice. With a vehement nod, he trembles in my arms, and as with all startling, feverish adventures conducted in my company, he does what he has always done. He says yes.

 

[January 17th]

In Hanwell Cemetery, there are war ghosts.

Once, before I knew what it was like to wake up next to anyone, I engineered nightmares. Lucid nightmares. I set the stage for my own nightly undoing, to see what it would be like, and it never occurred to me that I should feel bad about that. Then I met someone whose internal terrors showed me what it was like, not having a choice in what you dream up.

I didn’t feel bad, even then. I didn’t think about remorse while he stayed up nights with me, and told me all about Kandahar. Of what it was like the very first time he woke up, peered into a scrap of mirror, and didn’t recognize himself.

 _The things that must have done, to an ordinary man,_ I’d said, and I’d wanted to kiss the grim cast of his mouth, blot the hurt and despair carefully, not to take it away forever – if I took it away forever, would he be as interesting, by half? – but to absorb some into my breath and bloodstream. Even then, I wanted to invent new ways to make it easier for him to inhale, because he was no use to me dead. He would be the world’s worst dead person.

“He tried to make you sleep.”

Mycroft’s arrival is as cumbersome as his patently unnecessary umbrella. It may be cold tonight, but there are no signs of rain. The stars are bright. The lamplight gleams with a certain lack of forgiveness on my headstone. In this, at least, my brother has kowtowed to my wishes. There is no ornamentation. There is nothing, save my name.

_\--nothing but you in the entire sodding cosmos, Sherlock you marvel, you great, astounding genius, I love--_

I shake my head, hard and sharply to the left, and the thought skitters out, slinking into the ground, scented with aftershave, and brandy, and the faintest traces of damp puppy.

It was raining, then. It was raining when we picked her out. I may not know a great deal about literature, but I know enough to know that pathetic fallacy is clearly meretricious. Sometimes it rains when you’ve a tiny terrier curled up in your greatcoat, and you know the dog is learning your heartbeat, because canines are woefully stupid and loyal that way. They’ll follow you into a minefield. They’ll follow you into Kandahar, if you let them.

Sometimes it’s perfect weather for a funeral.

“I know he did,” I say. “I switched out Mrs. Hudson’s pills with placebos the day before. I replaced them before I left. He drugged me with nothing but hopefulness.”

If Mycroft has any emotively-tinged response to this, he doesn’t volunteer it. Gradually, he comes to stand at my side, wrinkling his Oxbridge nose. “Is that... _hound_ I smell on your coat?” He seems surprised when I laugh, but more startled that the sound I make is genuine.

Why shouldn’t I laugh, after all? Why shouldn’t I laugh when things are funny? In Hanwell Cemetery, ghosts are entitled to do as they like, particularly ghosts who are the byproducts of war. I will continue to do as I like. Dying doesn’t change that.

I turn up the collar of the greatcoat against the wind. Hanwell is utterly deserted, save the pair of us. It’s been three hundred and seventeen minutes since they buried Sherlock Holmes. The service was exceedingly dull, but even I have to admit that the mourning was excellent. It made up in intensity what it lacked in people who actually give a toss about me.

He looks beautiful on all days, but he looked especially beautiful today. He was wearing a three piece suit: brand new, immaculately tailored to his build. He didn’t select it himself. This was an act of subtle sartorialism that Mycroft no doubt performed around that compact, infinitely mappable body of his.

The valiant, semi-crushed army doctor, home from the wars, draped and fitted for this, his most expensive of possessions, from boot to pant seam, from waistcoat to tie, from darted jacket to ivory pocket square, all without his notice. If these weren't _cosmically_ fucked times, according to Molly Hooper, this data would be inconsistent with every scrap of information I've hoarded in his honour. He has always been a careful minder of things, his, and mine, and everyone else’s. In Kandahar, he kept nothing that wasn’t pre-stamped by Her Majesty's Armed Forces. Everything from the army that once was his, has since been given back, and maybe another miniature physician wears them now. Maybe he has died in them.

Maybe, as I watched him fall onto his knees in the finest fabric he’s ever worn, someone else far away was shielding their eyes from the terrible things that ought never fall from the skies, yet do, regardless. While he was mourning me, his back plagued with tremors he tried to stop, but couldn’t, his fingers slick with sweat, sliding down the engraved recesses of my name, his voice cane-throttled with every unsteadiness imaginable -- while he was falling apart, maybe another soldier, wearing his old military kit, was having his own shoulder carved into by a different, no less cruel executor.

He mourned me better than any living or dying man has a right to claim. Maybe it’s a good thing I am neither. Now I exist in the ghostly ledger. Now, I will join the ghosts of Kandahar, and of every private war we ever conducted, in London and away from it.

I looked at the entire thing. I didn’t turn away, once. Not even when everyone else left, and it was just the one man remaining, frozen before my grave with grass stains inked into the knees and shins of his trousers, with fresh dirt trapped beneath his blunt fingernails. I looked, and I looked, especially then.

“Where to, then?” Mycroft tilts his ludicrous brolly in the direction of the cemetery’s south exit.

“Florence, tomorrow,” I say, gritting my teeth to do it, but volunteering the information that Mycroft already knows. “Moriarty’s web ran deep, and I need information. Names, principally,” I clarify, as he quirks an eyebrow, leaning against my tombstone most inelegantly.

“And then, when your... business is sorted. You’ll come back?”

I say nothing, and I can hear the sigh rumbling in his chest cavity before he releases it to the frigid air. We let the silence tick on in this way, for a length of time that I don’t feel compelled to measure. It all becomes less companionable by the second. The leaves continue to rustle. Each grave is as silent as it was when I arrived.

In my head, unabated, the air raid continues. Lives are lost by the second. The dust bowl of the desert tinges a gummy, indiscriminate pink, and someone wearing his military best takes a rifle wound to the shoulder. I shut my eyes so I can see the bullet piercing through, and through. I shut my eyes, and my shoulder hurts. In my head, the wound is clean, and savage, like the best kisses I’ve been granted. It will hurt, I realize with a clarity that’s demarcated in lines of beige sand dunes, the only unshifting sand in the world. It will hurt forever.

_Good._

Finally, thankfully, it begins to grow tiresome to be here. I turn on my heel, making for the southern exit and the unmarked vehicle idling in wait.

“Give it to me.”

Mycroft’s voice is uneven, and I whip around, my teeth bared again, but this time, I know I’m snarling. I don’t want to help it. “What was it you told me about sentiment, _brother?_ Careful, now, the filial concern is starting to seep through. Let me alone, and I’ll see you at your estate.” I turn my back on him again.

“Sherlock.”

I stop. It’s useless going forward until he’s tried to do this, I realize. He wants everything. He won’t leave me be, and suddenly it’s just as bad as when he slammed his body against the door of my university dormitory thirteen years ago, shrieking my name while I traced out imaginary, fantastic equations on the ceiling inside, the syringe still dangling comically from my forearm.

When I turn to face him again, I know my face is granite. It’s bedrock; it’s impenetrable. It will work. It has to work.

“No,” I say. I have never sounded so cruel.

Mycroft’s smile is as broken up as Molly’s was, and before I know what’s happening, a pair of fists seizes my hands, dragging them behind my back. _Henchman,_ I blink, registering the details, _of her Majesty’s Mycroftian service. Terribly strong. Resisting would be childish._

So I fight. I jerk my limbs from side to side, and I’m fairly certain I’m shouting, only I can’t hear myself over the train that clatters mercilessly through my skull, a train empty save one passenger with a limp and a lumpy oatmeal jumper, an express trip that only ever stops at Kandahar, and never returns home.

Mycroft’s security detail holds me both ruthlessly and carefully, mindful of the places where the faux-fall has bruised and abraded my skin, where it's knocked about my bones. I’m struggling just as much as I can. His breath against my ear is incredibly unmoved. Why, it’s almost kind.

My brother is standing before me now. The lamplight slants clean across his face, and he looks just as bad as Molly did. No, he looks worse. Tired, because sleep is the one commodity not purchaseable with a limitless credit card. Everyone stupid thinks its love, but that’s as short-sighted as someone trying to drug you with placebos.

It’s rest that you can’t buy. It’s the one true thing.

“No,” I repeat, my voice cracking like it did in the lab, and I hate that. Normally my voice does whatever I tell it to do. It’s unfair, I think, it’s _splendidly_ unfair. “No,” I growl as Mycroft carefully unbuttons the greatcoat, slides one palm into its interior left breast pocket. He extracts the book from its hiding place. The unruffled henchman releases my arms.

“No,” I say again, and maybe the word for my voice this final time is a whimper. No. No. No.

“It’s mine,” I try to reason with him, because I know Mycroft is a reasonable man. “It’s _mine._ Besides,” I add, feeling the train careening off its tracks, knowing that it will get to its destination no matter what I do, no matter how I lie, “besides, he won’t... he won’t even notice it’s gone.”

Mycroft pockets _The Fault in our Stars._ When he speaks again, his voice is as gentle as I’ve ever heard it, and it’s more than I can bear.

“Oh, Sherlock,” he says. “Chance would be a fine thing.”

I shut my eyes, because there is nothing else I can do. In my head, the bombs have begun to fall on London. They are falling everywhere, everywhere except 221B Baker Street, and this, I think, is enough.

This is more than enough to be going on.

**Author's Note:**

> Formaldehyde pens all sections contained in A Study In Grief written from Sherlock Holmes' POV, while Darjeeling supplies those written from the POV of John Watson, tag-team style!


End file.
